


Tempestuous

by withthebreezesblown



Series: The Tempest Inside [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Drabbles, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 08:32:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7611031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthebreezesblown/pseuds/withthebreezesblown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits and pieces relating to <i>The Tempest Inside</i>. Mostly prompts from <a href="https://withthebreezesblown.tumblr.com/">my tumblr</a>. Canon and AU drabbles from before, during, and after the main story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of gift for [trulycertain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain), who'd had a bad day while I was also having a bad day. An Alistair POV outtake of pure fluff from the main fic with the hopes of cheering someone up.

She’s laughing the first time he thinks it, one hand on her head where it’s just collided with his, and it almost comes right out before he can stop himself—the, “I,” makes it right past his lips before he can bite it back, but he doesn’t want to tell her _here_. He doesn’t want this place, where he laid awake as a child wondering what he’d done wrong, to be any part of this memory. Because he doesn’t know what she’ll say when he says it, but he knows he’ll remember the first time the words, “I love you,” come out of his mouth forever.

So he swallows it down for now. He bites it back a hundred times on the road to the Brecilian Forest. When Bodhan shows him how to roast a rabbit properly, and for once he’s actually made food that’s better than just not poisonous, and he pulls bits off the stick it’s roasting on and feeds her with his fingers to make sure she gets more than anyone else, because the others, they don’t understand what the Warden appetite is like, and she deserves… everything. He bites it back again when her eyes close as she chews, and she sighs and leans in toward him, giving her instead another bite, from what should have been his share without letting her realize, because he _loves_ her.

When she comes to him with the enchanted sword, it nearly catches in his throat, doesn’t want to go down, but she’s beautiful and terrifying, and she isn’t terrifying because of the weapon. She’s terrifying because, who has he ever loved before? He’s cared too much too often more times that he can count, but this? He doesn’t even know what to do with the words but spit them out at her, and that doesn’t seem right either, so he recites something from the Chant, the first lines that come to him, to keep them from surging out when he moves behind her and pulls her back against him.

And maybe he should have told her before he invited her into his tent, or maybe it should have been the first thing he said when he got her there, but Maker help him, he wasn’t joking when he said he can’t think straight around her, and he doesn’t know if this means to her what it means to him, and, _Oh, Maker_ , please, just let him not be a disappointment this once, because he _thinks_ he can—and he’s _thought_ a lot about—and he loves her.

She’s still asleep when he wakes in the morning. He tries not to touch her, but there’s a strand of hair that keeps drifting back and forth across her chin with her breath, and it looks like it tickles. As soon as he moves it, her eyes open, and it’s already there, right there, but he doesn’t know what she’ll say, and maybe it’s devious, and maybe he does it on purpose, but he waits until his lips are about press against hers, when she won’t be able to say anything at all, to finally stop holding it back. After, the way that she looks at him fills him up with something like courage, and with the urge to say it again, so he does, face buried against her chest so that he doesn’t have to see if she’s horrified, but then she _says it back_. And the amazing thing, the miracle of her, is that he doesn’t even question it. When she says, “I love you too,” the last traces of the fear disintegrate, and all he can do is smile.


	2. A Flower for Temptation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a tumblr prompt from The Great and Wonderful [trulycertain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain).

He thought he knew what temptation was. **  
**

At ten, it was the discovery that he could reach the shelf with the expensive cheeses all on his own. At thirteen, it was the weight of silence making him feel like he’d been buried alive, pressing harder and harder until he could not resist the urge to scream. At Ostagar, it was the impulse to smile at a girl who might not survive the night. _Don’t like her. You’re not allowed to like her until **after** her Joining._

He has, all in all, a rather poor track record when it comes to resisting what he thinks is temptation.

There’s the rose in Lothering, and he can’t resist picking it. There’s _her_ , pale and terrified of returning to the place where she had no power over her own fate, and he can’t resist giving her the rose he couldn’t resist picking. And then there’s the noise she makes when he kisses her neck just there, and suddenly the word _temptation_ is redefined completely.

This is surely what the Chantry means by the word. This, _this_ is what it’s always meant, and he never even knew.

For the first time in his life, he steps back. It isn’t that he doesn’t want– _Maker_ , he _wants_ –and that’s the problem, because he wants more than he can put his hands on, which is saying something, because he’s _all bloody **hands**_.

It’s relentless, a thing that tumbles through his blood, bouncing around inside him; it’s nothing like cheese or screaming to break the silence, and it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop when he breaks beneath her; it doesn’t stop when she tells him the words no one has ever said to him before and gives him everything he wanted from her that he couldn’t put his stupid, trembling hands on.

The thing about temptation, he decides, is that it is untouchable. The having does nothing to temper the tempting.

The losing does nothing to break the pattern of the thing that thuds in his veins.

When it’s all over with, temptation is the understanding that happiness has a price, and sometimes the price is the pain that will be paid for it later. Temptation is the certainty that it is worth it. Any price. Every time.

In the end, he discovers that he was right about temptation from the start. The cheese that was worth the whipping. The scream that was worth the solitary confinement. The girl who was worth everything.


	3. Promise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for a prompt on tumblr from the fantastic [nanahuatli](http://nanahuatli.tumblr.com/). Set after _Inquisition_. Maybe canon? I haven't quite written far enough to be certain yet.

Of all the tricks she learned in her youth, the two she learned first, on her own, by instinct, are the ones that have served her best since she left Lothering’s Chantry, no longer a child for the first time in her life, though she’d believed herself grown once before.

The first came easiest: how to lower her lashes, to tilt her head, to expose the curve of her neck, and then, with only an instant of eye contact before her gaze would slip teasingly away, to hook her prey. She had learned first how to be impossible to not see. And then she had learned how to be invisible even under the scrutiny of hundreds. Just the right not-quite-flattering shade of makeup to take her face from pretty to merely passable. Just the right not-quite-flattering dress, little different in style to dozens of others. Shiny copper hair darkened and dulled with the powder of walnut husks.

And just like that, the Divine herself can walk between a press of bodies without once catching a glimpse of recognition in the eyes that slide disinterestedly over her.

Though there are endless fascinating tidbits to be learned just outside the periphery of a dozen nations’ leaders gathered here with their endless entourages tonight, the man who’s caught her attention at the moment is the one she’s least likely to be looking for a way to ensure will bend to her will.

Even he does not recognize her like this. His eyes slide past hers when she would hold them with a gesture as practiced as the one with which he attempts to step past her, despite the fingers reaching for his arm. If she were to say simply, “Your Majesty,” she wonders how long she would have to trail after him before he would look closely enough to know her. But of all the things here tonight, this is not a game.

“Alistair.”

He freezes for an instant before, with a smile that changes his face entirely, she knows he’s about to embrace her.

A firm hand on the back of his arm keeps him from turning further toward her as she murmurs too quietly for any of his hangers-on to hear, “Ah-ah-ah. Really, Alistair, I thought you had learned a bit more tact than _that_. You would quite ruin all of my otherwise _very_ successful efforts at going unnoticed.”

The abashed grin he flashes her is so familiar that she half thinks she could turn and another whom she has missed would appear beside her, conjured by the sheer force of nostalgia.

When they pass through the open double doors to an unoccupied balcony, at a look from him, his guards plant themselves in the doorway, offering them however much privacy can be had at events like these.

It is only after they have caught up with each other and traded the tales each has heard about the companions they traveled with a decade before–all except one, so carefully avoided–that Leliana finally voices what she knows he wishes she would not. “She’s back, you know. At the Vigil. I had hoped she might come tonight.”

And now there is nothing familiar in the bitter smile he directs out at the grounds as he snorts. “With me here? I expect she’d seriously consider blood magic before she’d resign herself to such a fate.”

“Mmm. Is it terrible of me to fault her for her stubbornness when I know that it is the immovable wall through which even a Blight could not pass?” Though her laugh rises and falls like music, the sigh it ends on is a single note of sorrow. “She will not accept that the world has changed while she was away. She’s done nothing but sacrifice herself one piece at a time to see the world made right, and the moment her efforts begin to bear fruit, she becomes the most pig-headed pessimist I have ever encountered. If she thinks that after all I have done I will be content to watch her, dearer to me than any other, teach herself to be happy with less and less, she is wrong.”

She is bright and sharp as a flaming arrow as she lays out the argument she has been building bit by bit since the first moment she was addressed as, “Most Holy,” until there is nothing left to say. “Will you ask her?”

His face is half hope and half fear before he remembers that he isn’t a fragile boy anymore and it closes down to something hard and unreadable even with all her knowledge of how men give themselves away. “I can’t promise you anything.”

“You can promise me you’ll go to her. That you’ll ask her.”

The sound that comes from him is hoarse and harsh. “You really believe it’s just that simple. You can’t just… You may have had nothing but hope in one hand when you decided to remake the entire fucking world, Leliana, but you did it with a fist full of dirty secrets no one wants revealed in the other. Don’t think I don’t know that. And if you think either of those is going to work on Solona, you don’t know her at all. Leliana, I’m not the boy you remember. Maker knows I’m probably not someone she even _could_ care for.”

Later, under that same intense gaze, others will say it is as though Andraste herself burns there, leaving everything in her wake consecrated. Now, she says fiercely, “No, you’re not the boy I remember. You’re the man he grew into. As kind and as brave and as decent as he ever was. There is no shame in who you are, Alistair. And I know her perfectly well. _I’m_ not the one who’s going to change her mind. You are.”


	4. Too Far and Too Close

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ridiculous fluff for a tumblr prompt from [celeritassagittae](https://celeritassagittae.tumblr.com/). A... deleted scene for _The Tempest Inside_? Set immediately after [chapter 17](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4840649/chapters/11965811) (the rain scene on the way to Denerim). An attempt to cheer myself up after writing [chapter 11](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6497899/chapters/16639636) of _[The Heart of the Storm](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6497899/chapters/14874019)_ , which kind of devastated me.

She’s still damp from the rain when they stop that evening. As the sun sets, the breeze becomes sharper until every gust bites. She finds herself drawn to the fire, but when she ends up on the opposite side of it from Alistair, she doesn’t know how to move without being terribly obvious. She wants to sit close to him–she _wants_ to burrow under his arm, against his chest, into the warm skin at his neck; she wants for him to kiss her again, like he did last night. So she waits as, one by one, her companions retreat to their tents, but by the time only the two of them are left, she finds that the idea of how to let him know, how to figure out if it’s what he wants too, has left her so cluelessly flustered that she cannot bring herself to move. There’s really only one thing for it.

She’ll have to lure him over to her.

Her hair. He likes her hair. Perhaps that will… By the time she’s got the pins out out and is pulling it loose, he’s looked up at her across the fire, and he isn’t looking away. She can’t help the smile that tugs at her lips, even as she blushes and cannot meet his eyes.

And that’s when the wind rises again. With a shriek and arms flying in all directions, grabbing at the mass of hair flying toward the fire as her feet scramble in the dirt, she tries to push herself back, though she doesn’t make much progress until a pair of arms wrap around her middle, hauling her away from the flames. When they’re both sure her hair is not, in fact, on fire, a rumble of laughter sounds near her ear.

“Maker’s breath, I wondered what you were thinking, letting your hair down that close to the fire when it’s windy…”

She turns to where he’s kneeling behind her with a grimace, a fist aimed at his shoulder though he catches it before it lands. “Shut it, you. It’s your fault, really.”

He’s laughing even harder now. “My fault? What did I do?”

Well, it isn’t as though anything she says now can embarrass her any _more_ than she already is. “You sat too far away.”

He looks genuinely surprised before a smug smile spreads across his face as he settles himself beside her. “Oh? Too far away for what?”

She’s tempted to try to punch him again. Instead, she lets the stupid grin fighting for control of her face have it as she looks away, not quite brave enough to look at him as she mutters, “The thing. With the lips and… I haven’t decided how I feel about it, so I thought there should be more testing.”

And sure enough, her answer wins her what she wants. Or nearly. His lips land at the corner of her mouth, though before they slide around to meet hers directly, he’s suddenly laughing again.

“You tried to get me to kiss you by setting your hair on fire. Maker, you’re a terrible flirt.”

Her head falls into her hands. “You’re an ass, you know that?”

“No, it’s just,” the laughing finally stops, though she still hasn’t the courage to raise her head and look at him. When he speaks again, though it is just as happy and warm, something else entirely has replaced the humor in his voice. “It’s just that it’s funny because you didn’t have to do anything at all. Maker, I’ve wanted to kiss you every time I _look_ at you for… a while n–”

She finds her courage. He never does finish the sentence.


	5. A Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Complete trash AU, written for no other purpose than that I really wanted to write Cole about Solona and Alistair because [celeritassagittae](https://celeritassagittae.tumblr.com/) shamelessly encouraged me to write this nonsense (which is why I love her).

Leliana is lying. Usually, her lies are dark, shadowy, as though she can hide them from him. Can hide them from herself. But this is a lie so bright Cole doesn’t know how the man she’s lying to doesn’t see it himself in her eyes.

_It’s meant to be a gift._

It is for an instant. When two of them step out of the hallway leading back to Josephine’s office and into the main hall, full of bodies and voices, Cole can feel the weight of it settle on the man, the attention he always draws in places like this, from people like these, who think, “ _King_?” is a question that can ask for anything they want. After all this time, the man still has to remind himself not to draw his head down into his shoulders like he’s standing in a room with a ceiling too low, but the urge leaves him when a laugh he’d still know anywhere rises up and up and up, carrying away things that push down.

For an instant, it’s a gift.

And then it turns inside out–or maybe it turns him inside out–and it isn’t a gift at all. It’s everything he lost.

For her part, when the woman who laughed sets eyes on the man who can’t look away from her, attention either drawn by the focus of everyone around her shifting toward him or by the weight of his stare, all the walls she’s learned to build up go crumbling, and she feels… everything. It is a sea vast enough for even Cole to have trouble navigating.

Leliana puts her hand on the back of the man’s arm to move him forward, just the way another woman with an Orlesian accent used to when he was child, and maybe it’s the expectation that, if he doesn’t allow her to move him, she’ll _pinch_ just _there_ , where no one can see but, Maker, it hurts, that causes him to follow where she leads, or maybe he’s just too caught off guard to remember to resist.

Leliana is glowing so brightly that it takes a moment for just how reticent and fumbling their words are and the dark looks they both keep shooting her to make it past her own brilliance. The moment she starts to lose her illumination, he can’t keep himself from moving toward the three of them.

“It’s okay. They’re only angry because anger makes the pieces stick.They’re afraid of what they’ll reveal if all the pieces come apart.”

Leliana is _flickering_ , flame caught in the draft, unsure whether to burn brighter or be blown out. He could help her do what she intended. He could make her mistake worse than it is.

“He remembers the first time he saw her, all wide eyes and wonder. He remembers the first time she scared him, _Maker’s breath, you can’t just stand there when they’re coming for you_. Fatal and fragile, fraught and fierce, the first kiss was cataclysmic.”

Leliana is flickering even faster now.

After a stunned moment, the man smiles almost amicably, but Cole can feel the sharpness all around it, edges brittle enough to break again at the slightest touch.

“Well, at least he stopped short of describing what I’m like in bed.”

And then Varric is joining them, and that’s nice, because it’s a good story, theirs. Varric likes good stories. But he isn’t listening in that gently weedling way of his; he’s pulling on Cole’s arm.

“All right, kid, as far as I can tell Fereldans aren’t even fond of _having_ emotions, much less talking about them. I doubt their King and their Hero are any different.”

But Cole resists, his pale eyes seeking out the man’s as the dwarf tries to lead him away.

“You make her remember too. She remembers exactly what it was like to be young and, outside all that stone, infinite. She went on and on, and there was nowhere the world didn’t touch her, nowhere she didn’t _feel everything_ , raw and too much, nowhere except in your arms, the one still place at the center of the storm that raged everywhere. And now she doesn’t know if you’re the calm or the storm, but she’d stand in either to be beside you.”

If he lets Varric lead him away then, it’s only because he thinks that he’s said just enough to give them the courage to say the rest.

Later, he joins Leliana on the battlements that wrap around her tower. Her elbows are resting on the parapet, and her chin is cradled in her hands as she stares dreamily at the two figures opposite her who have no idea they’re being observed. Arms wrapped around one another, lips pressed together, a small flurry of snow is drifting just around them, a pretty sound he can hear across the space between them.

“She doesn’t even know she’s singing.”


	6. Fromage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt on tumblr from [trulycertain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain). The setting: roughly 9:18 Dragon, the kitchens of Redcliffe Castle.

The young woman stomps through the kitchen toward the larder muttering to herself.

“Eet eez a ver-ry… enthusiasteec ahtompt, but… we weeell just go weeth those quaint leetle ahpple tawts for thee pawty, I theenk.” She snorts bitterly. “Pompous, uppity Orlesian… urg!” Even alone, she doesn’t dare call the Arlessa the word she’s thinking out loud. “Like one of her stupid tiny dogs, with too much _fluff_ and not enough _sense_. As though I wasn’t trained by one of the best cooks to ever come out of her insufferable country! I know how to make a damn mac-ar-ron,” she gags the last word bitterly, gargling and choking on the r in her mockery. The Arlessa has become increasingly outrageous in her censure since the head cook died the month before. As though she does not have reason enough to miss Sabina, kind and matronly, with a softer, rolling accent that had never grated at her the way the Arlessa’s does. The woman had a way of ensuring everything ran smoothly, of coordinating efforts she didn’t even seem to be a part of. Without her, it is a struggle to pull every meal together in time to be served. And one of the younger kitchen hands told her she saw a rat bigger than the Arlessa’s lap dogs in the larder. Maker only knows what secret that she had yet to share with her protege Sabina had used to keep them away.

It is what she’s thinking of when she walks into the larder, still treading heavily in her irritation, and catches a movement in the corner of her eye before a cacophony of things falling and hitting the ground reaches her ears. _Rats_. On instinct, she screams, already stumbling back, when she sees that what’s caused the avalanche is not, in fact, a rat.

One hand comes up to press over her heart, and she can’t help laughing at herself. “Maker bless me, I thought you were…”

Her words trail off as a sob that he’s very obviously trying to hold back bursts from the child cowering in the midst of a pile of fallen vegetables, one fist pressed tight to his mouth.

“I’m…” He gasps out another sob and tries again, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

She knows the boy. It’s the one they say is the Arl’s bastard. A surge of sympathy wells in her. She has only endured the Arlessa’s politely masked contempt for a month. The woman has made no secret to any but her husband of the war of attrition she’s been waging against the child from the first moment she set eyes on him.

She moves toward the boy, kneeling and tipping his head to make sure nothing has hit him too hard. “Oh, there now, lamb, it’s only cabbage. And the _madame_ doesn’t even like cabbage. As like as not, it’ll end up thrown out.”

There is indeed a bruise on his temple, but the fading shades of purple and blue rather suggest that it was not caused just now, nor by anything so forgiving as a leafy vegetable.

She thinks suddenly of her own first day in the kitchens of Redcliffe’s Castle. She’d been ten, perhaps the same age as the boy now, and her mother had been dead less than a week. And she had cried. She’d been so angry at herself. No one would want a crying _baby_ to help in the kitchen. They’d throw her out, and then what would she do?

Instead, Sabine had smiled at her gently. She remembers her words exactly.

“I see just what the problem is. Any cook worth her weight could.” She takes the boy’s hand as she stands, grabbing something from a shelf and leading him out to the kitchen counter, where, despite the fact that he is very nearly too big for it, she lifts him under his arms with a groan and sets him on the surface. “Food is a magic all it’s own, you know. The trick to it isn’t just knowing how to make it. It’s knowing what to prescribe and when. And for this–” she takes his chin again, staring at him as though she can see everything, and even if she can’t, she can guess well enough. A month ago, the boy was moved from the castle to the stables. And, judging by the state of the child’s face, the village boys she’s seen him playing with occasionally have understood the message sent by the action better perhaps than the oblivious, besotted Arl himself. “–well, there’s only one thing for this.”

She unwraps the package, and a glance at the boy’s face as it changes from intrigued to terribly suspicious makes her laugh. She remembers her own reaction. _“But there’s **mold** on it.” What was said about Orlesians must surely be true. They were all mad._

What she couldn’t have known as a child was the price of the cheese the woman was so casually cutting a hunk from, the trouble she’d have been in if it was known she’d fed something so precious to a dirty little kitchen maid. It makes her smile again as she rearranges the knife to slice an even larger chunk. _Unsatisfiable, cruel shrew. I know how to make a proper macaron, and I know the value of your cheese, and I’ll feed the whole damn wheel to the boy if I like._

Though his nose wrinkles, he accepts the chunk she hands him. She cannot help wondering if he would have dared to take the first bite if he were any less starved for a bit of kindness than he is. It is, she understands, what he is accepting more than the moldy cheese itself. Her kindness.

By the time he finishes, his expression has transformed to one of wonder as he grins at her with more adoration than she thinks even the most expensive cheese ought to be able to buy from a child. “That was really good. Thank you.”

He really is a beautiful child. She has half a mind to tell him to just walk out the castle gates and keep going. Surely some woman unable to have children of her own would scoop up a child with a face like that, and perhaps she wouldn’t have a castle to keep him in, but surely it would be better than…

She stops herself. Those thoughts will do her no more good than calling the Arlessa a whore.

“I tell you what. The next time you need a bit of magic, you come find me. It’ll be our secret. But I think you’ll be okay for now. Run along, lamb.”


End file.
